My inner copyeditor was gleeful when it came across three fun real-life errors in one day!

A Perspective on the Prospective Employee

This paragraph is from a work email introducing an employee taking on a new position.

Prospective—an adjective meaning “likely to happen at a future date; concerned with or applying to the future.”

Perspective—a noun meaning “a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.”

In our regional dialect, many people likely pronounce “perspective” as “prospective.” I suppose we all know what is meant—even if we don’t know how to spell it or say it.

An Unusual Date

This is a flyer from our local ski resort:

The date is pronounced “twenty-thirth,” I imagine.

The Curious Case of the Canine Dog

This paragraph is from a news article about electronics-sniffing police dogs.

I can only imagine that the officer quoted in the article was referring to a “K-9 dog”—which we all know is a term for a police dog—and the reporter recorded this as “canine dog”—which just looks redundant and silly.

Naturally, when I see this sign, I immediately want to move the chair and then stand on it!

(Is it permissible for one to sit on the chair, I wonder? And how does one access the items on the shelf behind the chair if it cannot be moved? A chair that can neither be moved nor used seems to me to be a pointless chair…)